I have some good news to announce: Microsoft will be applying
the Community Promise to the ECMA 334 and ECMA 335 specs.

ECMA 334 specifies the form and establishes the interpretation
of programs written in the C# programming language, while the
ECMA 335 standard defines the Common Language Infrastructure
(CLI) in which applications written in multiple high-level
languages can be executed in different system environments
without the need to rewrite those applications to take into
consideration the unique characteristics of those
environments.

"The Community Promise is an excellent vehicle and, in this
situation, ensures the best balance of interoperability and
flexibility for developers," Scott Guthrie, the Corporate Vice
President for the .Net Developer Platform, told me July 6.

It is important to note that, under the Community Promise,
anyone can freely implement these specifications with their
technology, code, and solutions.

You do not need to sign a license agreement, or otherwise
communicate to Microsoft how you will implement the
specifications.

The Promise applies to developers, distributors, and users of
Covered Implementations without regard to the development
model that created the implementations, the type of copyright
licenses under which it is distributed, or the associated
business model.

Under the Community Promise, Microsoft provides assurance that
it will not assert its Necessary Claims against anyone who
makes, uses, sells, offers for sale, imports, or distributes
any Covered Implementation under any type of development or
distribution model, including open-source licensing models
such as the LGPL or GPL.

A few months ago we approached Bob Muglia
and Brian Goldfarb
(@bgoldy) at Microsoft
with a request to clarify the licensing situation for the ECMA
standards covering C# and the CLI (also ISO standards, for the
ISO loving among you).

Astute readers will point out that Mono contains much more
than the ECMA standards, and they will be correct.

In the next few months we will be working towards splitting
the jumbo Mono source code that includes ECMA + A lot more
into two separate source code distributions. One will be
ECMA, the other will contain our implementation of ASP.NET,
ADO.NET, Winforms and others.

Depending on how you get Mono today, you might already have
the this split in house or not.

Thanks to everyone at Microsoft that worked to get this
approved and released. We appreciate that they made this a
priority when we approached them, and we know that everyone in
the .NET team was also incredibly busy with various betas:
.NET 4, Visual Studio 2010, Silverlight, MVC, MEF and much
more.

I am overflowing with joy right now. Cheers!

Update: Send your thanks
to @bgoldy on tweeter,
who crossed all the t's and dotted all the i's to make this
happen.

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